Kenneth Battelle gave Jacqueline Kennedy her tousled bouffant, readied Marilyn Monroe for that famous J.F.K. birthday serenade, and created the chic-est heads at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. After a half-century, New York’s master hairdresser is snipping, shaping, and soothing a new generation of best-tressed women.

In the witching hours of May 16, 1990, a frayed electrical wire—embedded inside a second-story wall of the granite town house at 19 East 54th Street—sizzled and threw off sparks. By 4:51 A.M., when the first alarm rang, this miniature torch had ignited the third floor, and by 5:58, after two more alarms had sounded, 125 firemen from 27 companies were battling a conflagration that was incinerating the entire five-story 1897 structure. Nobody was trapped inside, however, as the palazzo-like building had not been used as a private residence since its original inhabitant, a Vanderbilt, had moved out in 1917. Since the spring of 1963, it had been occupied by Kenneth, Manhattan’s poshest hair salon—and had served as home away from home for its proprietor, the master hairdresser Kenneth Battelle, and his devoted staff of 100, as well as for his clientele of grandes dames and celebrities, including, over the years, Gloria Vanderbilt, Jacqueline Kennedy, Brooke Astor, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Pamela Harriman, Bunny Mellon, Diana Vreeland, Jayne Wrightsman, Drue Heinz, Babe Paley, Rosalind Russell, Hedda Hopper, Lucille Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe.

That fateful morning “it was raining in a way I had never seen before,” Kenneth says today. Employees showing up for work, clients arriving for standing appointments, and longtime customers—alerted by radio and phone—braved the downpour to witness the inferno with Kenneth in woeful disbelief. News of the calamity swept through New York’s rival salons, where rumors sprang up that the fire had been the handiwork of an arsonist. Some competitors even went as far as to send representatives down to 54th Street to poach Kenneth’s dispossessed staff. “Nobody offered me a job,” he says. “I do, however, recall a girl from a daily newspaper asking, ‘Kenneth, how do you feel right now?’ And I replied, ‘How the f do you think I feel? Go away!’ I mean, how does anyone expect you to ‘feel’ while you’re watching your whole life go up in smoke?”

The “whole life” of Kenneth Battelle, only son of a traveling troubleshooter for the Nettleton Shoe Company, began in Syracuse, New York, in 1927. When he was 12, Kenneth’s parents separated, and his mother turned to her bookish, artistic boy to support her and his four younger sisters. He obliged by washing dishes at the Syracuse railroad station, operating an elevator, short-order cooking, and selling beer at a baseball stadium. “And every chance I got, I attended the movies,” he says.

As the movie theater was not quite enough of an escape, at 17 he enlisted in the navy. On leave one day in 1945 just after the war ended, Kenneth was strolling down Park Avenue in his sailor uniform when “a car suddenly turned a corner,” he says. “It was a large, beige Lincoln Cabriolet, with spoked wheels and side-mounted tires, driven by a chauffeur in matching beige livery.” The car stopped in front of Louis Sherry’s restaurant, and a lady’s black, diamond-buckled satin shoe slid through the open door, followed by a slim leg sheathed in black silk hose embellished with clock needlework. Next came a neat, crimped head crowned by a small hat. “A black veil of dotted Swiss lace obscured her face,” Kenneth continues, “and she was dressed in a soft black satin suit with a deep, unpressed hemline. When she stepped onto the pavement and started walking, the bottom of her skirt swished sensually around her legs, and then unwound and wrapped back the opposite way.” Back at the base, Kenneth declared breathlessly to a friend, “I have just seen why I have got to move to New York City!”

Allotted funds by the G.I. Bill to attend school for only six months, Kenneth had to jettison his plans to become a psychiatrist. “So when I spotted an ad for a beauty school that read, earn $100 a week in six months, I thought, That’s for me,” he says.

While enrolled in New York City’s Wanamaker Academy of Beauty, on East 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, he moonlighted at Chicken Divan, a restaurant in the East 50s, and played show tunes at a piano bar. After further studies at his hometown’s Marinello Academy of Beauty Culture, he found a job at the Starlet Beauty Bar, across the street from Syracuse’s Greyhound bus station. “I made up something there called the ‘club cut,’” he says—“a Waspy, wavy bob inspired by 30s magazine illustrations.” In six months, Kenneth says, “we became the shop in town.” Emboldened by this local triumph, but afraid to make New York City his home, in October 1949 he migrated to the hair salon of Miami’s Sorrento Hotel. Finally, on July 1, 1950, with $8 in his pocket, he moved to Manhattan, into an apartment above a pair of randy Communists on Third Street between Avenues A and B. Elizabeth Arden offered him a job—“at their branch in Lexington, Kentucky,” he says. “So I went over to the competition down the street, Helena Rubinstein, at 52nd and Fifth.”

At Rubinstein, Kenneth specialized in work no other operators would deign to take—styling the hair of models and editorial assistants. Shrewd about publicity, Madame Rubinstein granted these working women salon services free of charge, sometimes in exchange for magazine credit lines. “The other hairdressers would do these girls badly so they wouldn’t come back,” Kenneth says. “There were no tips or percentages to be made.”

In 1954 the newlywed Jacqueline Kennedy was staying in Manhattan at the house of her sister-in-law Jean Kennedy Smith while her husband, the junior senator from Massachusetts, underwent tests on his back at the Cornell University Medical Center. She dropped by Helena Rubinstein to see Lawrence, creator of her wedding coif, only to find he was home sick with a cold. The reception desk paged Kenneth and asked him to fill in for his indisposed colleague.

“At the time Mrs. Kennedy—whose name meant nothing to me—had what was known as the Italian Cut,” Kenneth recalls. “It was too short, layered, and curly for her tall proportions and big bones. I planned to soften the line and the shape, and I suggested she do this by growing her hair longer. I wanted to stretch it out by setting it on big rollers—the only problem is they did not exist then. So I had some specially made up in Lucite. In those days hair was permed and permed until it wasn’t hair anymore. It was tight frizz, intended to last and last. It had no movement and no shine; it didn’t reflect light. I have always thought of hair salons as laundries. Well, what Mrs. Kennedy and so many of the other ladies were getting was what I called ‘washed-and-ironed hair.’”

Kenneth had a revolutionary idea, which informed his makeover of Jacqueline Kennedy and attracted a growing following of grateful ladies during his six-year tenure at Rubinstein. “I believed that hair should be like fabric—light should pass through it, and you should want to put your hand in it. I thought of hair as soft, healthy, lustrous, innocent, and pretty, like a child’s.” To recover the essential, virgin nature of hair, Kenneth developed the technique of cutting it wet and blunt, while sectioned off with clips. “I was looking to make hair fuller, to make it swing and swivel with the head”—not unlike the satin skirt of the mysterious sylph in the beige Lincoln.

If the kind of lady whose hair was done by Kenneth at Rubinstein was possessed by an impulse to buy a hat, she would head over to a nine-story house on 56th Street between Park and Madison, the address of Manhattan’s smartest millinery emporium, Lilly Daché. “Boy, was Lilly a sharp lady,” says Gillis McGil, one of Daché’s favorite models. “By the mid-50s she could already see the handwriting on the wall—hats were on their way out. So she added a salon”—a mirrored theater-in-the-round, whose chairs and vanities were vertiginously reflected in a perpetual pink-and-white carousel. “It was extraordinary,” McGil says. “But it was always empty.” Daché sought advice from McGil and another of her pet mannequins, Missy Bancroft. “We both told her, ‘The salon’s beautiful, but you need a hairdresser,’” McGil remembers. “And Lilly said, ‘Well, then find me a golden boy—a genius of hairdressing!’ That’s how Kenneth came to Lilly Daché.” Very quickly, Kenneth recalls, “we became the most important salon in New York,” ministering to “this strangely powerful group of customers.” But to his clients, the most “strangely powerful” person on the premises was the man brandishing the scissors. Lucille Ball announced her arrival at the salon by bellowing, “Where’s God?”

In 1957, Gillis McGil ran into Kay Kendall, the movie star, on Fifth Avenue. “Kay had just wrapped Les Girls, and her hair was dyed that ghastly Technicolor red,” says McGil. “I asked her where she was going, and she said, ‘To Elizabeth Arden. I’ve got to do something about my hair. I look like Danny Kaye in drag!’” McGil steered her to Kenneth instead. “She was one of the most striking-looking women I’ve ever seen,” Kenneth says. “A tall, gorgeous clown.” Trying to balance the proportions of her small head with her rangy physique, he “cut her long hair to about four or five inches, and tinted it back to her own brown. Then I added lots of little blond streaks, set it on small rollers, and brushed it all up with tendrils in front of each ear.” The coiffure, debuted in a Vogue portrait of the actress by Irving Penn, became such an international sensation, he says, that on some days “there was a line of women waiting outside Daché to get the Kay Kendall hairdo.”

The following year Kenneth received a cry for help from another victim of Hollywood hairdressing, Marilyn Monroe. “She was finishing up Some Like It Hot,” he says, “and she complained to [designer] Norman Norell that her hair was falling out from overbleaching and overperming. He gave her my name, and she called me from his showroom. I made her hair softer, smoother, and straighter. From then on, whenever she was in New York, she came to me at Daché or I went to her apartment at 444 East 57th Street.”

Kenneth traveled with Monroe to Chicago for the world premiere of Some Like It Hot in March 1959. “Marilyn didn’t care much about clothes or jewelry,” Kenneth says. “Before we left she went to Jax on 57th and Fifth and bought three silk shifts—one in white, one in black, and one in tan. She borrowed a beige mink from Maximilian and took along two strings of pearls. When we got to the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, a movie P.R. guy spilled his glass of champagne down Marilyn’s front. She was wearing the tan dress—and you could see everything, like she was in a wet T-shirt. She was going to throw the mink coat over the stains for the press conference, but I told her that if she wasn’t changing her dress she should at least put on some underwear. She said no, she wouldn’t do that, because underwear made lines. I said, ‘I hear Jean Harlow didn’t wear underwear, either—but she used to bleach her hair so it wouldn’t show through.’ I went downstairs to the hotel drugstore and bought her powdered milk of magnesia, 20 percent peroxide, and spirits of ammonia—you only need a few drops. It’s a very old formula for decolorizing hair. I told her, ‘Now go in the bathroom and bleach the Y.’ Nothing showed through when they switched on those bright lights. After that she was more careful.”

Monroe called on Kenneth for another, more poignant public appearance—her release from Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in March 1961. “Arthur Miller declined to come, so Joe DiMaggio got her out instead,” Kenneth remembers. “Marilyn was very vulnerable—the kindest, sweetest, most generous person I’ve ever known, period. And I don’t mean generous with gifts. I mean generosity of spirit. That’s why she was slapped down all the time, always getting hurt. Anyway, I went to help her make her exit from the hospital. She simply told me, ‘I want to look good.’ When she came outside, I was absolutely staggered by the way her fans behaved. It was as if they owned her—as if she belonged to them. But Marilyn had that ability to make her movie audiences believe she would leap out of the screen and sit on their laps.”

Kenneth also groomed Marilyn in May 1962 for J.F.K.’s 45th-birthday rally at Madison Square Garden, where she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Monroe (who was the president’s lover during this period) “did not want me backstage with her,” Kenneth says. “She said she was fearful of publicity. I don’t really know what she had in mind, but since I was doing both Marilyn and Mrs. Kennedy at the same time I imagine it was about that.” The last time Kenneth ran his fingers through Monroe’s platinum waves was in June 1962, for Bert Stern’s final sitting with her in California for Vogue, just five weeks before her death. Monroe, however, was not the only celebrity on location that summer day at the Bel-Air Hotel; by then, recalls Babs Simpson, the editor on the Vogue shoot, “Kenneth was so famous that in the Los Angeles airport people stopped him for autographs.”

One reason that Kenneth was so identifiable at LAX was that for a year and a half, starting with Inauguration Day 1961, he had been officiating as Camelot’s “Secretary of Grooming.” Says Karlys Daly Brown, Glamour’s beauty editor during this era, “Kenneth was known in every state of the union. We traveled around the country together doing makeovers on real women for the magazine. In Anchorage, Alaska, we were eating at a lunch counter and two teenage girls started giggling—they recognized him. He was so popular with our two million readers that if we ran a cover line with his name on it circulation shot up.”

Kenneth cringes at the memory of the legions of helmet-head knockoffs unleashed by his tousled bouffant for Jacqueline Kennedy. The original conception was looser, Kenneth explains, but then “photographs were published of Mrs. Kennedy coming down an airplane staircase outdoors. The wind lifted her hair straight up in the air. She received all kinds of negative letters about that, so out came the hair spray. But I always allowed a few wisps to fall away to make her look less ‘set.’ There’s a photo of the president and Mrs. Kennedy together in a convertible on their way to pick up the King of Morocco in 1961. The president is gazing at her and brushing these strands away from her face with his fingers. That’s exactly why I put them there.” Says an erstwhile Vogue fashion editor, “Kenneth had a gift for dealing with people like Jackie, Marilyn, and Judy Garland—they could trust him never to showboat or coast on their fame. His hair for Jackie was particularly brilliant because he understood how it would work with the camera—the height he gave her lengthened her head and balanced her broad cheekbones. It was a kind of grown-up exaggeration of little girls’ hair. With Jackie’s bouffant, Kenneth killed off the hat.”

The last time Kenneth primped Jacqueline Kennedy during her husband’s administration was at seven A.M. on November 21, 1963, just before she left with him for Dallas. “Her main concern was whether it would hold,” he recalls. “I cut it before they took off so it would stay fresh.”

The next morning Karlys Daly Brown was with Kenneth at the salon when he learned of the assassination. “My assistant called me from the office. ‘Turn on the radio!’ I shouted. ‘The president’s been shot!’ I remember Shirley MacLaine was there, too, and she started pounding and screaming, completely hysterical. Kenneth was at work on a customer, and he kept on sectioning and cutting, sectioning and cutting, in a daze. He was traumatized, in shock. He has no recollection of this at all.”

In the 60s, “Fashion happened below the hips and above the shoulder,” The New York Times’s Marylin Bender wrote in her 1967 chronicle of the period, The Beautiful People. “The hairdresser ... has become the most important man in a fashionable woman’s life.” Only two hairdressers vied with Kenneth for tonsorial pre-eminence—Paris’s Alexandre and London’s Vidal Sassoon. Former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella remembers photographing the haute-couture collections at a Paris studio for Vogue in the 60s, in an overnight, seven-P.M.-to-five-A.M. session. “We had Alexandre on an upstairs floor,” she says. “Downstairs, we were doing a cover shoot of Candice Bergen, with Kenneth. Well, at some point in the night Alexandre ventures downstairs, looks Candice over, and sniffs disapprovingly, ‘American style!’ You see, Candice’s hair was marvelously free, soft, and pretty, while upstairs the hair was being pulled and tortured.”

Sassoon, on the other hand, was “literally their edgy counterpoint,” says Alexandra Penney, Glamour’s beauty editor from 1968 until 1973. “A Sassoon cut sculpted and defined the face; a Kenneth cut framed and enhanced it.” Adds Roger Prigent, a photographer who worked with both men, “Kenneth was not avant-garde like Sassoon. But he had all-American class.”

For a long time Kenneth had dreamed of his own House of Beauty, a voluptuous palace of pampering, inspired by the glamorous Hollywood-movie images he had absorbed as a Depression-era child. Several clients had offered to set him up in his own establishment, but he was holding out for “educated money,” Kenneth says. In 1962 he found the backer he was seeking in the Glemby Company, a family-owned salon-and-beauty-supply firm. The partnership they formed enabled Kenneth to acquire a 50-year lease on the 17,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival town house at 19 East 54th, whose coffered dome, marble Corinthian columns, and cascading staircase were all majestically intact. Though decorator Billy Baldwin—who shared with Kenneth such upper-crust clients as Bunny Mellon, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, Missy Bancroft, and Jacqueline Kennedy—did not ordinarily take on commercial projects, he agreed to have a look around. “Billy asked me, ‘How do you see this place?’” Kenneth recounts. “And I answered, ‘Like the Brighton Pavilion—an extravagant folly built by a king out of his mind. I want it to have a circus quality—all red, yellow, and white, with tents. I want a Chinese lamp on every newel post, and pattern on pattern everywhere.’ Billy said, ‘I think I could probably do that.’” Unveiled eight months later, on March 4, 1963, at a party attended by his staff and his A-list clientele, the salon was declared “archrevolutionary” by social commentator Cleveland Amory, and Glamour raved that there was “more joyous ornament and detail at Kenneth’s than in an entire collection of Matisse paintings.”

After waiting up to three months for an appointment, a woman (perhaps hiding her wilted hair beneath a scarf and her bare face behind dark glasses) entered the salon under a festive red-and-yellow awning, pausing first to admire the latest exquisitely surreal installations by master window dresser Gene Moore. Next, the client glided through a pair of massive wrought-iron doors and, in a private paisley cabine, exchanged her Mainbocher or Pauline Trigère for a colorful poncho. (If she wore a fur, the coat was whisked away to a special cold-storage closet.) A wig boutique beckoned on her right, and, unbeknownst to Madame the Client, secreted elsewhere on the ground floor was a clandestine styling room, where a mistress might safely be hidden from a wife.

The lady then ascended a broad, sweeping staircase to the second floor’s large paisley-tented drying room, illuminated by an enormous blue chandelier, and to its red bamboo-trellised combing and setting rooms. One flight higher were the “wet rooms” for tinting and shampooing—furnished with black patent-leather chairs, terra-cotta sinks, and white counters, “as antiseptic as surgeries,” Vogue observed in 1963. Also on the third floor was the thriving heart of the enterprise—the butter-yellow sanctum sanctorum of Kenneth, where the wizard practiced his craft. His top stylists (attired in sober suits and ties) labored calmly near their boss, beneath striped and calico canopies. Consecrated to physical fitness, the fourth floor was equipped with massage rooms, cypress steam baths, waxing chambers, whirlpools, and a Pilates studio, where at least one dowager’s hump was ironed out. “For a beauty salon, we’re out on an awfully long limb,” Kenneth admitted to The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross, the first female out of the gate on opening day.

“Kenneth’s salon,” says Grace Mirabella, “wasn’t your typical soupy, sugary vision of loveliness—nor was it sharp and tough. If you were doing decorating of any kind, elements of its design would definitely catch your eye.” Not everyone could assimilate the sophisticated carnival-in-the-jungle aesthetic, however. “One woman shrieked, ‘I’m getting out of here! It looks like a brothel!’” Kenneth recalls. “As she ran out I said within earshot, ‘Do you suppose she’s been in one before?’”

The real draw of Kenneth—besides his flawless, pricey cuts—was not the décor but the impeccable service. “I believe in coddle, coddle, coddle,” he said. “Her Majesty the Customer’s hands and feet were propped up for manicures and pedicures on plump Porthault pillows, black-stockinged maids silently presented lunch or tea on Porthault trays, aromatic Rigaud candles or Ramu, the house perfume, liminally scented the atmosphere, and a black Mercedes diesel station wagon, available on a first-come, first-served basis, ferried customers to and from the salon. “Kenneth’s house seems to have a curiously hypnotic effect on most women,”Vogue remarked. “The décor, the ambiance, the techniques of treatment … combine to calm and soothe in a way that might well be studied by the makers of Miltown.” Lee Radziwill (Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister) agrees: “Kenneth’s salon had a great serenity. It has been compared to a club, but it was so much more comforting than that.”

Kenneth reflects, “Women used to come in just to sit and have lunch, or leaf through magazines. We had Country Life, Publisher’s Weekly, Atlantic—but never any scandal papers. Or they’d nap on a chaise. You see, Kenneth—I’m talking about the entity, not me; I make that distinction—belonged to them. They felt safe, even more sheltered than at home.” This sense of well-being emanated from Kenneth himself, Alexandra Penney feels. “He has magic hands—a gentle, reassuring, healing, invisible touch. From the instant Kenneth puts his fingers in your hair, you feel better, even look better. It’s a kind of ‘laying on of the hands.’”

‘Almost every famous female head in the world,” Vogue observed in 1963, “has gone or will go” to Kenneth. Grace Mirabella says, “If you ever wanted to learn who was in town—Jacqueline de Ribes, Marella Agnelli—all you’d have to do is check in at Kenneth. If you heard Mary Farr, the top stylist, was leaving for a few days, then you knew Jackie Kennedy would be traveling. And if Kenneth disappeared from the scene, that meant he was off doing work for us at Vogue”—most infamously, a 20-page spread shot in Tahiti in 1967 with photographer Norman Parkinson, editor Babs Simpson, two German models, and a white horse.

“Well, Kenneth was the hairdresser on the Tahiti trip,” Diana Vreeland recounted in her memoir D.V. “Some of the great men are hairdressers, and he’s the greatest of them. So I said to him, ‘The tail of a Tahitian horse may not be ... enough. You may have to fake it. It may be too skimpy. Best to take along some synthetic hair.’” Kenneth explains more plainly, “For inspiration Mrs. Vreeland showed me an 18th-century French picture of a horse all festooned and garlanded, with a long, curly white mane and a tail plaited with enormous bows. I packed loads of white and off-white Dupont hair. But when we got to Tahiti, we couldn’t find a white horse anywhere. Finally, we located a stallion who hadn’t seen a lady in eight years; he was horny as hell. As I was dolling him up with fake hair, taffeta bows, and real flowers, he saw a donkey around the bend. He took off, flying toward her. All my decorations flew off, too, down the side of a mountain, where no doubt they remain today.” Instead of Vreeland’s rococo vision of a bedizened, sugar-colored steed, “we ended up with a picture of that donkey in a straw hat. I punched two holes in it and pulled the ears through.”

Kenneth was more successful confecting fantasies with false hair in the confines of his own salon. And there was no greater showcase for the more flamboyant side of his artistry than Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, staged at the Plaza Hotel on November 28, 1966. Among the ladies whose hair Kenneth prepared on that day were Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill, Lauren Bacall, Rose Kennedy, Marietta Tree, Isabel Eberstadt, D. D. Ryan, Pamela Harriman, and Capote’s guest of honor, Katharine Graham. The traffic was so backed up at 19 East 54th Street, Kenneth recalled, “we had a lot of wives, ex-wives, and mistresses that we had to hide in different places. Some of these hairdos required up to seven hairpieces at a time.” His tour de force for the evening was the Fragonard puff he contrived for Denise Bouché, widow of portraitist René Bouché: he whipped her hair into a towering soufflé, and then, parting it down the center, dyed one side black and powdered the other half white.

Kenneth was not among the social, literary, and artistic gratin asked to Capote’s dance. Nor did he aspire to be. Once a habitual guest at such events as Bunny Mellon’s Cape Cod birthday party for Jacqueline Kennedy, and Amanda Burden’s wedding on Long Island, “Kenneth was on his way to becoming a big social star,” says New York Times columnist Enid Nemy. “But at a certain point he chose to back out.”

Accounting for this withdrawal, Kenneth explains, “One evening in the mid-60s, I was invited to a vernissage of tempera paintings at Diana Phipps’s, on Central Park West. In walked Drue Heinz, asking me what I was doing for dinner. I had no plans, so we left in her car for the 79th Street Boat Basin. She made a call, and a launch arrived to take us to a yacht. The yacht turned out to be Onassis’s Christina, on its first trip to New York. When we got on board, people were already having dinner and dancing. Maria Callas made a diva’s entrance and took a seat at the bar. I had never before seen a roomful of people stand up for a woman. Anyway, I was very happy I went. But the next day in Suzy’s column in The Journal-American there was a headline: pickle queen goes to yacht party with hairdresser. I was mortified. And I made it a policy not to go out with my clients again.”

Defying the crueler laws of fashion, Kenneth never went out of style. “Though he is so strongly associated with the period when my sister was in the White House,” Radziwill says, “Kenneth stayed au courant.” His charter customers brought in the next generation—he designed wigs for Babe Paley’s daughter Kate, a victim of alopecia, and later Missy Bancroft sent both her daughter Jenny and her granddaughter to him, while the philanthropist Sue Newhouse, who first went to Kenneth at Daché, made converts of her two daughters-in-law. Kenneth’s golden circle of patrons flexibly encompassed writers (Lillian Ross), artists (Lee Krasner—“I called her my favorite gargoyle”), and obscure bohemians (Barbara Feldon before TV stardom). If a model, widow, or divorcée intimated that she could no longer afford Kenneth’s services, “he would tell her, ‘You can’t afford not to come,’” says fashion executive Kitty D’Alessio. “And he would not charge her.” Keeping up with the times, he launched lines of hair products, wigs, and cosmetics, including his risqué Makeup for the Bosom, which consisted of nipple rouge and a contouring powder to accentuate cleavage. In the 80s he proposed to The New York Times Magazine a New Wave version of the conventional Kenneth “lion” coif, which he named “Park Avenue Punk.” Also immune to time, Billy Baldwin’s savagely elegant décor did not date, though by 1985 it was beginning to show wear. With $1.3 million of his own money, and this time himself as decorator, Kenneth rejuvenated the salon in a one-month late-summer flurry of renovation.

“And then bam! It burnt down,” fashion illustrator Joe Eula says. While Kenneth watched his House of Beauty turn to ashes, he had little inkling of the full extent of the damage. Optimistically, Victoria Meekins, his vice president and an employee since 1972, rode up with a fireman to the fifth-floor offices in a cherry picker to salvage appointment books and Kenneth’s 1961 Coty Award, the first and last ever given to a hairdresser. “We expected to reopen in a week or 10 days,” she says. Equally sanguine about his prospects for a speedy comeback was the consortium of clients, former employees, and friends who took out a quarter-page ad in Women’s Wear Daily with the headline get that phoenix flying!

But the phoenix discovered that his wings had been shorn. Even if he had wanted to reconstruct Kenneth, the salon, from the cinders, he discovered he could not. Though he still had about 20 years remaining on his lease, his landlords seized upon a fire-or-earthquake clause that entitled them to evict their tenant. And in a second devastating blow, Kenneth learned that he would not even receive the cold consolation of cash from the insurance company, which should have amounted to around $2 million. “Because we were not a Subchapter S Corporation I had to pay both personal tax and corporate tax on the fire-insurance money,” he says. When Joan Rivers suggested that he sue, Kenneth replied, “I don’t live in sueland.”

Constrained to return to work, he rented half a dozen empty chairs at Eva, a beauty parlor in the Helmsley Palace Hotel. A third of his staff followed him there, and the remainder of his retinue, including Kevin Lee, a stylist whom Meekins had hired in 1987, vowed to return as soon as Kenneth found a large enough space. “He was sort of double-decker there at the Helmsley for two years,” Kitty D’Alessio says. “It was a pretty tacky place.” Brooke Astor liked the makeshift setup even less. “It’s perfectly awful,” she groused. “We’re squeezed in, there’s no air.” Joe Eula says, “After that, like all good diplomats, he ended up at the Waldorf-Astoria.” Far more compact than its predecessor on 54th Street, the Waldorf incarnation of Kenneth’s hair salon nonetheless retains many of his signature sybaritic touches—finger sandwiches catered by William Poll and served by uniformed maids, bottles of Kenneth nail polish to take home after manicures and pedicures, drink cups neatly covered in foil to prevent stray hairs from drifting in. And, as always, the salon is so hygienic that clients could eat their chicken-salad-and-watercress sandwiches off the floor. “He’s a surgeon when it comes to cutting hair,” Sue Newhouse says.

“I have to think of 54th Street as ancient history,” Kenneth reflects. “I was very lucky to have had it, very spoiled. There had never been anything like it before, and nothing like it will ever exist again. I’m now cutting the hair of the great-granddaughters of some of my original clients. And, no, I won’t give names, because, amazingly and wonderfully, there are still people coming to see me who believe your name should only appear in print at birth, marriage, and death.” In 2002 he anointed Kevin Lee his creative director. “Kenneth invented modern hairdressing,” Lee says. “I’m building on this tradition and will keep it going.” Already he has developed a new array of Kenneth products, which will be available in the fall, and attracted a more youthful, visible clientele. Kenneth remarks, “I’m glad, because as I’ve often said, I don’t want to watch myself die with my clients—although I have been asked to do dead customers. I’ve refused—there are professionals who specialize in that sort of thing.”

Now a distinguished-looking gentleman of 76 (in his bespoke English suit he could pass for an ambassador, or a psychiatrist), Kenneth is sitting in a straight-backed chair at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Cocktail Terrace. Having placed an order for tea and scones, he winces as the lounge singer croons “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” “That’s supposed to be Cole Porter’s piano,” he says about the Steinway she is thumping. “He used to live here. Should I plug her up with my scone?” He sips his English Breakfast instead, and tunes her out while contemplating his half-century of hairdressing.

“Nobody asks me for an autograph anymore,” he muses. “No one in Wappingers Falls, where my country house is, knows who I am. And that suits me just fine; in 54 years I have never once seen my reflection when I look in the mirror—only my client’s. I like knowing when I wake up every morning that I can make people happy.”

Kenneth rises to leave. As it is still early in the week, he will not yet be riding up to the country, where, in solitude, he tends the plants in his flourishing garden like so many heads of luxuriant female hair. In less than 14 hours, he will resume his post at his shop, with a fully booked day ahead of him. “I never thought much about whether I would continue like this or not,” he says, considering his parting words carefully. “It’s just that I don’t know how to stop.”